"How much am I worth?"

Designers and non-creatives alike, have all ask themselves this questions at somepoint or another. Personally, you are the ultimate source of your self-worth. This can be tricky to figure out though and can depend on a number of factors ranging from, experience and education to emotional maturity.

A few things to consider:

1. Conduct yourself in a professional manner and always get everything in writing. Email works fine, but some sort of contract with an outlined pricing structure and timeline is always best.

2. Ask yourself, “What are they asking in terms of design?” (Seems you have this with your comments on what design projects are expected.) Is this a new logo build or an adaptation of the old one? Will you be handing their corporate identity standards manual along with a logo design, letterhead, business card template and so forth?


2. Ask, “What are they asking in terms of leg work?” Will you have to provide the materials and negotiate printing costs and budget for final product shipping? Do you have to provide the finished pieces and do installations for said artwork? Basically you just need to know if you are strictly designing the art and handing it over for them to send to processing.

3. What is your time worth? Are you currently employed with a 40hr+ full time job and this will break into any other time you have or are you freelance with more time to devote? I say never charge any less, per-hour, than you would if you worked for a corporation as a base price point.

4. How much time will this take? Day? Months? Year? What is the timeline they have in mind? (The shorter the time the higher the price for rushing.) Make your time valuable so you have incentive to continue when it looks like your drowning. If the answer to number 3 was x amount for 1 year of work, and they want the same amount of work in 6 months, be sure to double that.

5. No matter what, always always always design in vector format - Illustrator/InDesign. It’s the mark of a seasoned designer. If you go into Photoshop thinking your design will be amazing in print, for the most part, you’d be wrong. It’s not the smart, or cost effective thing to do and they’ll end up asking for it in vector format later anyway and then you waste a ton of time trying to figure out how to recreate it in vector without losing what the client has built in their mind from the original proof they signed off on. Then they get angry and have to pay more for replication cost by outside vendors.

Take the overall time in hours you plan to work or think it will take to finish this project and be sure to add padding room. It’s always best to over-estimate time and budget. Under-Promise and Over-Deliver as they say. You should multiply that time estimate by the base per-hour rate you feel your time is worth, (I’d say for a seasoned artist, no less than $45/hr.). You can then demand half up-front before submitting the logo design. This is a common practice with freelancers that I know and I myself use.

Also, NEVER, EVER, EVER give them high-resolution composites before you are paid at least your up-front fee. When you present to them, outline your timeline, cost expected for the project and the 50% up-front / 50% upon completion compensation you expect. I also make the up-front amount non-refundable in case they back-out half way through proofing and demand money back.

If you’re looking for Pay-by-project vs. hourly salary breakdown, then I’d say,(depending on what you have to do in totality.), you should factor in your experience a little more heavily. Will this take an art-house intern a week do vs. your highly skilled and efficient, two days? Figure out what your competition might charge for the project, before submitting the first round of proofs. If they back off from that amount and request to see the proof first, offer a low res jpeg proof. This keeps them from using your vector file illegally by shipping it off to FedEx/Kinkos for letterhead reproduction. Also, demand a smaller up-front fee of your choosing. If they say no, chances are they are using you and will take you for a ride and not pay you in the end citing some “technicality” or “miscommunication” when pricing was concerned and now they have you tied up in litigation for years and they got a complete re-design for free. Always remember, a designer’s work is valuable even if it’s not used. Never do something for free that includes a first proof. Be clear about this from the get-go and never back down. Show a backbone and they will respect you in the end.

Good luck!

That Newborn Client Smell

We’ve all had that client. Those difficult days where you have to deal with someone who just doesn’t get it. Maybe they have a lack understanding, time, education, resources or a mixture of any of these. They complain about their CMYK print outs not looking like the low res proofing PDF viewed on a monitor in RGB on a third party distribution site. They feel like you are cheating them by putting too much “white space” on an ad that, “they are paying for”. As if the negative space is some sort of trick to rob them of valuable starburst or coupon or menu “cram” room. They get pissed when you try to offer world class suggestions backed by Ivy league marketing engineers studies and the best psychology money can buy. They refuse to accept the benefits of a balanced layout and color schemes that make sense or the fact that 35 fonts is just much chaos. Any of this sounding familiar? Thought so. The point is, you need them and they need you, for better or for worse.

So how do we deal with these types of cry babies? Treat them like a wise and patient parent, not a deadbeat nitwit. Sometimes we have to hold their hands, tell them their special, give them warmth and food and clothing and pay for all of their mistakes until we reach year eighteen and can legally boot them the heck out if they fail to launch on their own. Tough love. Okay maybe we’ll wait till twenty-one when they graduated college or something, but you get the point.

Now, there are varying levels of design maturity your clients may be at. They levels go a little something like this:

The Infant: Aww they’re so cute and smell new! They listen and actually want to be helpful, but have no clue what you are asking when using industry terms like bleed, margin, glue gap, trim, fold, .eps or .PDF. Basically they just nod and smile and make spit bubbles expecting you to clap and make noises at them. Severe hand holding must be initiated. You’ll get them there but they may have a melt down in the middle of the produce department when they smell something like broccoli. Irrational fears must be calmed. Prepare for worst case scenarios with this one as normal print tolerances / web functionality expectations meet reality tend to set them off in fits of rage.

The Toddler: A.K.A., Jon Snow, they know nothing. “What’s a font?” “My brother’s step-son made my logo for me and I really like how he made my website with a clown gradient background. Can you guys do something like that?” “Do you guys accept Gimp files?” “Starbursts, starbursts, starbursts, gradient, registration black text. Oh also, can you put a picture of my dog in my cupcake/cell phone/title loan company ad?” Key here is to Educate, educate, educate. School is in session. Permanently.

The Pre-Teen: They aren’t misunderstood, but they do misunderstand. “Can you use my low-res business card scan and this PowerPoint slide as a layout? Why is it not fitting the 10.25″x12.125″ dimension? My design looks good on my 1024x768 powerpoint slide on my monitor! Can I put my entire menu on the back side where you originally had the coupons?” You’ll be constantly reminding them to do the necessaries like package documents or send hi resolution images for the four-hundredth time.

The Teenager: They understand the need for good design, but aren’t willing to do anything to get what they want. They don’t want to pay, or listen to half of what you suggest. They also tend to be the know-it-all’s. “Hey I saw something cool on instagram I think would be awesome to put into my advertisement.” They also have a tendency to say, “Make it cooler!”. They make eight revisions from scratch. They are basically every ignorant sales rep chasing nothing but the sale I’ve ever worked for, with few exceptions. (No, Shane and Corey, you’re cool.) Basically, they want to drive a car that’s way to fast for them. The expectation is a Lamborghini, when in reality they have a ‘92 Ford Taurus budget. They know what InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop is, but they only like Photoshop, because it’s cool. “So I should just Photoshop everything?” NO, use data protection! Vector anything scale-able for print. (You should know how to convert for web though.)

The Young Adult: They understand you’re doing your job. They trust you. You’re the working professional. They aren’t. They still want to tweak things and make it “original”, though. They “get” Photoshop and InDesign, but they are running a few versions behind because it’s just not something they worry about. It’s recreational for them. They know just enough about the programs and system and design to make your job slightly difficult, but for the most part they are fairly knowledgeable and you can get away with taking risks here. Sends some high res photos, maybe some fonts, half of which may be corrupt

The Actual Adult: Has great design sense, a clear vision, may even know exactly what they want. Perhaps, so much so, that they don’t need any proofs or layout options and just need you to put it together for them. “What’s that? You have a clear mock-up of what the ad should look like, included high resolution images and fonts that have punctuation characters included for multi-lingual support?! You sure you aren’t a graphic designer?”. They are always up to date with their software and may even challenge you to be better.

At one point or another you WILL run into each of these maturity types of clients. The important thing to note is when you get on one of these phone calls or go into one of these meetings with clients like these you keep your cool. Escalation is what you don’t want and it’s easy to avoid. Regardless of their level of design expertise you have to maintain control.

So, based on the different levels of maturity you should be able to come up with a plan of attack for each so you can fill in the gaps where they may need your professionalism, experience and parental guidance. You want them to respect you and you can’t get respect by just yelling at them. You need to know what you are talking about, have subject matter experts with you if you aren’t one already and if you don’t have one on hand you need to network more or know where to get the answers for them. Never say, “I don’t know.”. It’s okay to say “I’m not sure about that, I’ll need to check with a colleague, let me get back to you on that.”. Sometimes it’s comforting for a client to believe It’s not what you know it’s who you know. You want the client to feel that YOU are that person that they know who has the answers. Stay confident, stay in control, have a plan of action for each of the levels of maturity and always maintain a helpful attitude and never escalate emotional outbursts regardless of the clients position. These simple things will help you negotiate some rough terrain with even the most heated client. Trust me. Congrats, it’s twins! Good luck!

Design Like a Vulture

Sometimes we need a little help. Luckily the design industry has lots of free resources available out there, but sometimes you gotta go nomad and scavenge the interwebs for it.

Here’s a list of designer resources I’ve used over the years to help me in a pinch. A lot of designers already know about most of these, but just in case you forgot about some…

STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY: Good old fashioned royalty-free stock photography, you can’t beat it. especially when it’s got Vince Vaughn in it. Check it out!

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3043138/use-these-generic-stock-photos-of-vince-vaughn-businessing-for-all-your-business-needs?utm_source=facebook

Okay, here’s a more reasonable site to pull royalty-free, high-quality stock photography from that has a broad spectrum of subject matter.

https://unsplash.com/
STOCK VECTOR GRAPHICS: Don’t forget the ever important shortcut wormhole in case you forgot your thumbdrive full of social media logo types. They have a few links to many other helpful pre-canned, trendy, flat design icons and map elements, useful for various things.

http://www.dreamstale.com/free-download-72-vector-social-media-icons/

Oh and if you can’t find a popular brand’s logo because the franchisee doesn’t have access to the corporate FTP library, a lot of elements new and old can be found at:

www.brandsoftheworld.com

Just make sure you check with the client before sending a proof to validate your using the latest version of the logo. This includes all major credit card logos as well.

FONTS: There’s obviously nothing more important to any text based design layout than the font you chose. It has to be legible and you can’t be missing punctuation or capital letters. FontShop has the best variety of safe, well designed fonts and have free selections as well as those for pay. It’s a lot better than dafont.com which is for chumps in my opinion.

https://www.fontshop.com/

On the other side of this coin is when you have some mangled locked and undocumented font on a poster the client likes and you need to match it. Here’s a cutesy website that helps identify those pesky fonts.

http://fontsinuse.com/

COLOR SCHEMES: Helpful in a pinch when you aren’t sure what triad might go well against a burnt-orange logo element in your layout.

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

WEB DESIGN / CODING: Maybe you’re a newbie trying to cut into the web design space or maybe you just need to brush up on some coding languages.

http://www.w3schools.com/

SOCIAL MEDIA MADNESS: Maybe you need to manage your time a little better and want to save some by pushing a status update to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and App.net? There’s an app for your phone called Buffer (Android, iOS) that does just that. 

Want to manage more than one Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumbler, ect. account at the same time? You gotta go with Hootsuite. They have a free version for PC/Mac that supports up to 3 social media accounts. You can pay a fee if you need more than than to upgrade to Pro or Enterprise levels of service.

TUTORIALS: Looking for assistance in a design program or three? There’s YouTube of course, but how do you know you’re getting a legitimate designer behind the wheel or anyone with real world experience that won’t lead you down some dark alley of personal trial and error that may or may not be the fastest or safest method or performing the actions you are inquiring about? You don’t, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t research but I recommend getting some tutorials from…

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials/

or

www.Lynda.com

or the native video tutorials that come with an upgrade to any
Adobe Creative Cloud software.

BONUS APP!Install Odrive (PC/Mac) on your computer and hook it up to your various cloud-storage services to keep everything in a single folder. It’s free for up to five accounts.

Hopefully this will be useful to you in your efforts to manage your resources more efficiently.

Copyright Law in a Nutshell for Designers.

http://myows.com/blog/copyright-basics-for-graphic-designers-part-1/

I was looking for something to help better explain the rights a designer has over their work when this just fell in my lap. It’s specifically dealing with copyright law. Very informative without needing a law degree. Check it out.